Thursday, June 6, 2013

Reading Logs This Week

June 6, 2013

Here are my reading logs for this week.


Tomorrow series by John Marsden
Dystopian

The rest of the Tomorrow series continues with the kids from Australia fighting to stay alive during a war in Australia. Unlike other stories that take place during a war these kids are alone for most of the wartime and had to rely on each other to survive. I liked how the book was not all fighting and it included some of the other struggles like finding food and shelter.

On Thin Ice by Jamie Bastedo
Fiction

This book takes place in Nanurtalik Greenland from the point of view of a young girl. The town has not seen a polar bear in decades but when the body of a teenaged boy is found along the side of a road people begin to fear that polar bears have returned. Throughout the book I got a view of what it is like living in the arctic and some of the struggles the people face due to climate change. I started reading this book a year ago but did not go past page one and gave up. I have wanted to go back to it for a while and decided now was a good time. This time I started reading and only put it down once to read two other books. The thing that got me to come back to the book was a discussion the other day in social studies. We were talking about the effect of climate change on the arctic and when we started talking about what is happening to polar bears the discussion turned into a debate of sorts. Some people said that polar bears have to learn to adapt to climate change and who cares if they go extinct. I was the only student in the class to stand up for the polar bears. After that class I went back to the book and couldn’t put it down.



This is Not a Drill by Beck McDowell
Fiction

Two students, Emery and Jake, are helping out in the elementary school French class when a man walks in demanding to have his son. When the teacher says no he pulls out a gun and won’t let anyone leave the classroom. This was really suspenseful and I did not know what was going to happen. With all the school shootings in the states this book made me not want to go to an American school anytime soon.

Failing kingdoms by Morgan Rhodes
Fantasy

This book is about a fantasyland where three kingdoms are fighting for power. The main characters are four kids from the kingdoms and their storylines eventually come together. I am not a huge fantasy fan but this book caught my eye when I noticed one of the characters was named Magnus. Magnus is not a common character name but one of my favorite characters from The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices is named Magnus. I wanted to see if this Magnus was anything like the Magnus from the other series. The plot was really good and kept me reading into the night. By the end I did not like Magnus and look forward to see what happens to him next.

Test by William Sleator
Dystopian

All students have to take this test at the end of the school year and if you fail there are consequences. The school that Ann goes to prepares the students for the test the whole school year. When Ann is threatened on her way home from school she and a new friend are caught up in a conspiracy act involving the creator of the test. This future probably won’t happen where we will suffer terrible consequences if we fail a test that we only take because if we don’t we could get killed. But we take in high schools we take provincials and in elementary some elementary school they take the FSA test. I would not want a psycho teacher like Ann has. I have never had a teacher that sits the students in order from best student to worst student before but I did have a teacher that posted our math test scores up on a chart for the whole class to see.

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